False Confessions

Selected for LA Film Festival, September 2018.
Would you confess to a crime you did not commit? Each year innumerable American suspects do, and experts say that trained interrogators can get anybody to confess to anything.

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False Confessions

False Confessions

During the process of a police interrogation in the US, it is common to use the Reid technique, a complex psychological tactic to get suspects to confess to crimes. Over the years, behind closed doors, in rooms devoid of recording devices to document the process, trained interrogators have been monumentally successful at getting defendants to confess often without regard for whether or not the suspect is actually guilty of the offense they are charged with.

Defense attorney Jane Fisher-Byrialsen is determined to put an end to interrogation techniques that all too often pressure innocent people into false confessions. The film follows four cases, all involving false confessions, and examines the psychological aspect of how people end up confessing to crimes they have not committed along with the consequences of these confessions for those accused, for their families and for society at large.

False Confessions will show just how easily a person can be trapped in the tunnel vision of an overconfident interrogator, who believes you are the perpetrator.